The most important thing is to stay vigilant.' 'There is little users can do to protect themselves from this threat, short of abstaining from card use entirely. It’s all about guessing any viable card details that work to sell,” says Briedis. After all, criminals don’t target specific individuals or specific cards. Being a computer, it can make thousands of guesses a second. First it tries 000000, then 000001, then 000002, and so on until it gets it right. Think of a computer trying to guess your password. “Increasingly, the card numbers sold on the dark web are brute-forced. Even if a card costs only $10 on average, a hacker can make $40 million by selling a single database, like the one that we analysed.”Īt 1,561,739, the highest number of cards came from the United States. At 419,806 cards, Australia was second.īased on NordVPN's risk indexing, NZ was found to be the third most vulnerable country behind Hong Kong and Australia. The Netherlands was determined to be the least vulnerable.īriedis says 'brute forcing' is a key way the cards got onto the dark web. “And the answer is that hackers can easily make a lot of money. We decided to look into how much a payment card costs on the dark web and why there’s a booming underground black market for them,” says Marijus Briedis, Chief Technology Officer at NordVPN. 'Since 2014 we have been seeing a constant growth in payment card fraud around the world. Visa Classic cards were 17 times more likely to be found on the dark web than premium cards. NordVPN says 60% of the cards were debit cards and 40% credit cards. Visa has the biggest share of the NZ market.

NordVPN says the average price of all the cards was US$9.70, with the average price of a NZ card US$18.54.Īt 38,429, a large majority of the NZ cards were Visa cards, followed by 6,565 Mastercard cards, and 197 American Express cards. The company says the 4,481,379 payment cards belonged to people from 140 countries. NordVPN, a virtual private network provider, says analysis of four million payments cards found for sale on the dark web show nearly 50,000 were New Zealand cards.

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